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There are thousands of tragic stories from Sept. 11, 2001. Of men and women who rushed to catch a plane, who happened to go to breakfast at Windows on the World or who simply went to work that clear blue morning.

The vast majority of those stories will never be widely known. Among the ones we do know, those of Rodney Dickens, Asia Cottom and Bernard Brown stand out for their poignancy.

Five years ago, the three were 11-year-old students in the District of Columbia School District. The National Geographic Society had selected them to participate in a research program at the Channel Islands National Marine Sanctuary near Santa Barbara, Calif., part of a research project known as Sustainable Seas Expeditions.

Rodney was taking his first trip on an airplane. "He was so excited," his grandmother told NBC News. "He said he was going to tell me all about it when he got back."

"You sure I can't go?" Clifton Cottom asked his daughter as he dropped her at Dulles International Airport. "She gave me a hug. She said, 'I'll see you soon.'"

The night before his big trip, Bernard confided to his father that he was scared. "Just listen to what the people tell you, and the instructions, and you'll be all right," Bernard Brown Sr. told his son. "You'll be fine."

The three children, with three accompanying teachers and two staff members of the National Geographic Society, boarded American Airlines Flight 77.

Members of the hate-America crowd and jihadist sympathizers occasionally hold forth about the bravery required to pull off the 9-11 attacks. As Bill Maher infamously said about crashing planes into buildings, "Say what you want about it, it's not cowardly."

When I hear swill like that, I think about the five terrorists at Dulles, mingling with the other passengers, waiting to board the plane. They saw those three children, full of promise and hope. As Flight 77 hurtled toward the Pentagon, they looked into the terrified eyes of Rodney Dickens, Asia Cottom and Bernard Brown.

If that is bravery, then the callous child murderers of Hitler's SS were among the most heroic figures in human history.

Such sentiments repulse decent human beings because they minimize crimes that transcend politics or ideology. To absolve the killers, much less to justify or glorify their actions, is to defile their victims again.

There's another way to vindicate the terrorists and desecrate their victims — by promoting outlandish conspiracy theories about 9-11. Of the many perversions about controlled demolitions, military pods and blacked-out windows, the one that has garnered the greatest number of maladjusted adherents is that a U.S. military missile — not a Boeing 757 passenger plane — struck the Pentagon.

What the peddlers of such tripe are really saying is that Rodney Dickens, Asia Cottom and Bernard Brown are merely props. Their families are dupes or liars, as are the hundreds of witnesses who saw Flight 77 bear down on the Pentagon. And, by the way, the U.S. government, not Islamic extremism, is the real enemy.

Science can't penetrate the small minds that cultivate such irrational beliefs. For the rest of us, the new book "Debunking 9/11 Myths: Why Conspiracy Theories Can't Stand Up To The Facts" systematically dismantles all the conspiratorial nonsense.

Building on the initial work of Popular Mechanics magazine, the book's editors draw on more than 300 experts and organizations in the fields of air crash analysis, structural engineering, forensic analysis, metallurgy and image analysis to establish a factual account of the events of 9-11.

"By refuting destructive beliefs in fanciful tales of mayhem," Sen. John McCain writes in the book's foreword, "Popular Mechanics has produced a valuable work that ... represents the innocent thousands who perished on that terrible day — those innocent thousands who deserve to be remembered with honor and truth."

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JWR contributor Jonathan Gurwitz, a columnist for the San Antonio Express-News, is a co-founder and twice served as Director General of the Future Leaders of the Alliance program at NATO Headquarters in Brussels, Belgium. In 1986 he was placed on the Foreign Service Register of the U.S. State Department.Comment by clicking here.